


Taking Advantage

by quiet__tiger



Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Contemplative, Drama, Gen, art therapy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-07
Updated: 2017-05-07
Packaged: 2018-10-29 06:20:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 654
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10848228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quiet__tiger/pseuds/quiet__tiger
Summary: There's a new form of therapy at Arkham Asylum.





	Taking Advantage

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: "Wall."
> 
> Originally posted to Livejournal 14th-Oct-2010.

It started with a doodle.

It was scrubbed away before too many people noticed it.

After another few doodles were created then scrubbed then drawn again, no further effort was made on keeping the long wall in the rec room clean.

It was a gradual thing from then on.

Words soon joined the scribbled pictures. A name here, an insult there. Nonsensical sentences and prose written in penmanship that ran the gamut from childish scrawling to calligraphy. A haiku, a limerick, a riddle. Written between sketches of trees, suns, animals, people, airplanes.

Anything and everything.

At first the utensils used to draw consisted of contraband pens and pencils, dirt, blood, or the art was simply scratched into the wall.

But soon paints, chalks, and crayons were provided to foster creativity.

To provide inmates with a way to express themselves without speaking, in a freeform group setting that was still controlled.

The doctors studied the growing mural carefully, looking into the layers of work for cries for help, for clues, for windows into the psyches of their patients.

An Oedipus Complex here, Narcissism there.

Dissociative Identity Disorder.

Agoraphobia.

Depression.

Antisocial Personality Disorder in spades.

The state was skeptical of allowing what was basically group therapy to be so public, but eventually the mural was approved as an experimental alternative form of therapy.

The mural started to serve as a message board, too, for inmates who were purposely kept apart from each other.

Pamela Isley left a message for Harleen Quinzel hidden in a dazzling drawing of vines.

Harleen Quinzel drew hearts for her “Mistah J,” though they always wound up colored in black soon afterwards.

Edward Nygma offered prizes for people to solve his riddles, but as no one answered them there was no way to know what he planned to reward to the solver.

The Joker, well.

He wound up making full use of the mural.

It was just that no one realized it until it was too late.

For a man who was only allowed finger paint and was always supervised, he managed to weave a tale among the pictures and letters already on the wall.

It wasn’t so much a tale as a plan.

It consisted of which guards needed to be killed or maimed, as indicated by a donut for the large one, a mouse for the shy one, and a frowny face for the angry one.

Then his escape route through Arkham—the lazy lines meandering between other inmates’ work didn’t seem so lazy once they were superimposed over the blueprints for the basement. Lines that ended abruptly represented previously-attempted dead ends.

He’d added flair to different doodles and scribbles to help himself keep track of where he’d been and which direction he should take to the next place—a new hideout, a new target, a new prop.

It was all so easy to see once Batman pointed it out, long after the Joker had escaped and killed a dozen more people.

Marks on certain letters that had to be unscrambled to figure out the name of the hideout he’d taken over.

Two of Oswald Cobblebot’s owl drawings indicated the topless bar on Second Avenue would be hit.

A sketch of a dog was marked to indicate the plan to add Joker poison to pet food.

And on it went.

So obvious in hindsight.

When one was not given tools to aid one’s memory, such as a pen and paper, one had to either increase the power of one’s memory or leave oneself clues.

Using the therapy mural, Joker had all he needed, provided he looked at things just a little bit differently to suit his own needs.

A month after his escape from Arkham, the mural was painted over with a fresh coat of white paint, and the experiment was abandoned.

The wall may have been helpful to some inmates, but it was certainly all too helpful to others.


End file.
